Millennials and their 'ghost' money will bring down economies. Just like they killed social interaction with the iPhone. Global Warming wont even have a chance to bring down mankind[peoplekind for Canadians...].

That has the effect that other cryptocurrencies are taking off when bitcoin is tanking, most notably etherium.

Also, CPU mining is coming more and more, and Threadripper absolutely demolishes Intel's Chips here - Even Ryzen 7 can almost keep up with Intel's 18-core beast 7990X due to the latter's biggest problem in this domain: lack of cache. Coffee lake, on the other hand, isn't far behind Ryzen since it does't have the same cache weakness Intel's xeon-based chips

This might be affecting the CPU and RAM prices in the future, because if these get more widespread, then certainly Miners will buy much more big CPUs too

I really want to ditch the RX 580. But I also don't want to spend $2,000 AUD for just a doubling in performance when the RX 580 only cost me $400 AUD.

I think AMD and nVidia need to build chips which are mining optimized, ditch all the rasterization baggage, cut down on the DRAM, sell it at a lower price. #Profit.

That would need to make entirely new chips, because you can't just simply cut out the things only used for graphics.

Also, that wouldn't solve the problem at hand, which is a lack of production capacities (which is why the RAM prices are also very high), mostly due to smartphones and other smart devices taking up an increasingly large chunk of the capacities. If production just could keep up with the demand, there wouldn't be a problem at all, but as it is, everyone is scrambling for the capacity.

Good news for Nvidia and AMD. They've been paid. They just need to make more and make more bank.

If this trend continue and chip manufacturar ramp up productions, in 5 years when production plateau we will have cheaper cards, the beauty of mass production. The more sales the more the price can go down. Lets just wait 5 years for the factories that are being constructed now get up to full speed.

Let it happen as soon as possible.

Can you do anything with etherium? Do shops accept that currency?

I don't have a list or anything, but at least here in Chile some law firms are accepting payments in ethereum. Don't know of anything else since I study law and that's the closest thing I could know about

Look at it this way - Cards are selling like hotcakes right now. At some point, either the bubble will burst, or mining will move on to other equipment. At that point, there will be tons of used cards flooding the market, driving prices down. So, while it makes it difficult to purchase high end cards now, it will put those same cards in the reach of even more people sometime, likely soon.